Pages

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

The Sparticle Mystery, season 3

Announcement! TV announcement! I’ve written two episodes for the upcoming 3rd season of The Sparticle Mystery, created by the brilliant Alison Hume.

The series starts on Monday, January 5th, 2015 at 5pm on CBBC and CBBCHD. I wrote episodes 4 and 9, so mine should be on 26th January and 2nd March - I’ll update that in case the schedules change, so keep an eye out.

I worked on the show early in 2014, joining their writers’ room led by Alison. It was a really fun, inspiring time, and I loved being part of the process. When the boss of the team is the head writer, it makes things SO much easier and smoother, because they’re right there with you, and all their notes come from a good, creative place. And it's lovely to have something of mine airing on TV again, after a long time off doing movies and development stuff (which takes ages) - I haven't gone anywhere, just been doing other things, that you'll hopefully get to see soon. Like this!

If you haven’t seen the show, you can catch up on season 2 on iPlayer now. If you’re just going to dive in - spoilers in this paragraph! Spoilers for seasons 1 and 2! - the concept is that one day, a Large Hadron Collider-style experiment goes wrong and everyone aged 15 and over gets sent to a parallel dimension - leaving the world full of children. Some of them want to bring the adults back and, obviously, some don’t. Right now, at the start of the third season, an attempt to bring the adults back has gone wrong, and the teenage versions of the adults have been brought back instead. Who’s in charge now? Ever wondered what your mum and dad were like when they were 14?? You might not want to know... End of spoilers!

I've never written purely for children's drama before, and if you're familiar with my work you're probably wondering why they let me... But I've done family stuff, and pre-watershed-friendly episodes, so I'm not a blood-soaked gore fiend ALL the time. And there's plenty of emotion and drama on kids' shows, this is no exception. Obviously I can’t say what happens in the episodes or the series, so you’ll have to watch and find out.

By the way, another show starting straight afterwards at 5.30pm, is EVE, created by Emma Reeves, about a robot girl trying to live a normal life with a human family. Emma’s brilliant too, and the show looks really fun, I saw some early prep work on it and it sounds great. So check that out as well! There’s a trailer for it here, and episode 1 is now online here.

UPDATE: I've just realised that, if the schedule doesn't change, my latest episode of TV will air on January 26th, almost exactly 8 years after my first ever episode of TV - "Sleeper", in season 2 of Torchwood, on January 23rd. And I'm still incredibly excited to have my work aired on TV, that feeling never goes away, in fact it gets stronger. Enjoy!